Patrick Conley stands atop the 30-foot-6-inch-long board table in the fourth-floor conference room adjoining his Fabre Line Club in his building on Allens Avenue in Providence. His development project is in a standoff with the Department of Environmental Management. He is also battling his industrial neighbors over the future of the waterfront.

Journal photo / Kris Craig

Patrick T. Conley is developing a substantial piece of property in Providence’s industrial harbor area. But the sailing is not smooth for the hotel-condo-clubhouse development that he hopes will be his legacy.

PROVIDENCE

Patrick T. Conley loves a good fight. The former amateur boxer, historian, lawyer and businessman has gone chin first into battles over Rhode Island’s constitution, gambling, ethics, Buddy Cianci and any number of building projects. Now, he is swinging with all he’s got in his biggest battle ever.

When he began restoring a pier and historic warehouse on the Providence waterfront several years ago, Conley said he hoped this would be the first phase of a $300-million hotel and condominium project that would be his legacy to Providence and the South Providence neighborhood, his boyhood home.

But now, as he looks down from the fourth-floor, multimillion-dollar conference center he recently completed on Allens Avenue, he sees trouble in every direction.

Conley’s Providence Piers project is bordered by a noisy shipyard to the south, a towering salt pile and fuel terminal to the north, and two strip clubs and an asphalt plant to the west. His access to the Providence River is partially blocked by a commercial tire dealer. Most of those businesses don’t want to be crowded out by new tourist attractions.

Just last week, they announced the formation of the Providence Working Waterfront Alliance and vowed to fight the very marina, condos and hotel that Conley wants to build.

Conley is also in a standoff with the state Department of Environmental Management over how to clean up contaminated soil underneath the parking lot where he wants to build most of his new projects.

The standoff is blocking the bank financing that Conley needs, and has left him at a standstill for months.

It’s all become very personal for the combative Conley.

He acknowledges that he completed much of the initial phase without applying for the necessary city, state and federal permits. Now, he says, state bureaucrats are “trying to punish me for my brazen defiance of convention.”

He accuses Governor Carcieri of engaging in a vendetta against him — a charge the governor flatly denies.

And last week, Conley declared war on his neighbors, calling them “incredible polluters.”

“This industrial waterfront is hazardous and obsolete,” says Conley. “They are operating like dinosaurs and like the dinosaurs, they should be extinct.”

The outcome of this clash may determine the future of Providence’s waterfront and guide hundreds of millions of dollars in future investments.

BARREL-CHESTED and energetic at 69, Conley jokes about his ego and doesn’t deny that he antagonizes those who get in his way.

For 30 years, he was a history professor at Providence College. He has written 16 books, mostly about Rhode Island’s history. As a lawyer, he has brought more than 40 appeals before the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

As a businessman, he has probably drawn the most controversy through his purchase of tax titles in the ’80s and ’90s for what he estimates were 8,000 houses in Providence. Most were redeemed by the owners, but he says he took ownership of some 2,300. Some urban leaders say Conley contributed to the blight in South Providence, but he says he dislocated only one owner-occupant and most of the properties were vacant and dilapidated. His work, he insists, revitalized neighborhoods.

Conley has written numerous op-ed pieces in local newspapers and has worked closely with the Democrat-controlled state legislature. His name comes up on thousands of Web sites, largely for his academic and athletic achievements. He still throws the javelin in senior track and field events. He recently won at a meet in Maine.

Like so many of Conley’s projects, Providence Piers started in 2002 with a tax sale. He bought the empty, four-story City Tire building for $106,000. Conley also paid $2.3 million for nine acres next door that were once the site of a coal gasification plant and later three large fuel tanks. Conley demolished the tanks and trucked in 6,000 yards of clean fill to cover the contaminated soil.

Then he laid out plans for his revitalization of the waterfront. He announced that he was going to be the first to jumpstart the so-called “Three Cities” plan that Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci announced when he was still mayor in 1999.

His project would give the city the opportunity to emulate Baltimore or Boston, rather than continuing as another Bayonne or Camden, N.J., Conley told one reporter. “Let our new motto be: Carpe portus — seize the harbor!”

Although he has participated in hundreds of business ventures, Conley says his waterfront project is the most important to him. He calls it his homecoming and says it is “the most sacred to me.”

A colorful new brochure shows a green park in the middle of the parking lot, surrounded by an 890-car garage, 17- and 23-story condominium towers, a 133-room hotel and an 88-slip marina — a million square feet in all.

The brochure includes a blurb from U.S. Sen. John Kerry, who visited in June, saying “This waterfront is a gold mine.”

During the last few years, Conley successfully completed the rehabilitation of the brick building and the nearby pier, while turning the empty acreage into a large parking lot.

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE Conley faced, he said two years ago, was cleaning up the properties. Little did he know.

Conley says he was vacationing in South America in 2005 when he learned that the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority was looking for a new berth for its Newport-to-Providence ferry.

The ferry had previously docked off Point Street, but it kept banging into the Providence Hurricane Barrier as it made its way up and down the river. RIPTA wanted a location south of the barrier, with more parking.

With the ferry due to start service in May of this year, Conley says he knew there was a lot of work to do and no time to wait for government permits. Conley said he had a choice: “Do we apply for permits and wait six months, or do we make the property look good for the ferry. We made it nice and clean. We paid our fines. We said we were sorry, but we’d do it again.

“We did some work and didn’t get prior authorization. We moved in an emergency situation. It was a rush.”

Conley’s contractor graded and paved much of the site to create a parking lot. He installed underground electric lines, placed riprap on the banks of the Providence River, set up a trailer for ticket sales, added two other trailers and repaired the pier.

He erected a big red, white and blue sign renaming the pier “Dock Conley.”

Conley spent $6.8 million more on the warehouse, and the results are dramatic.

For the fourth-floor conference center, he paid a craftsman to turn southern yellow pine planks reclaimed from a mill into a conference table that is 30 feet, 6 inches long — 6 inches longer than Donald Trump’s conference table, as Conley likes to say.

Other artisans created two massive, un-mortared fireplaces from Connecticut fieldstones. There are two bars and walls of windows looking out on the waterfront. On the lower floors, Conley and his wife, Gail, created an art gallery and space for 45 artist studios.

Within the fourth-floor conference center, he established a private social club. He named it after the Fabre Line, whose ships, from the Madonna to the Providence, carried more than 80,000 immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to Providence between 1911 and 1934, when the Depression ended the trips.

As Conley wrote in an essay he gives to visitors, the ships left Marseilles, France, and made stops in Naples, Italy; Palermo, Sicily; Lisbon, Portugal, and the Azores — at each port picking up passengers who wanted to move to the United States.

In another handout, Conley writes that the Fabre Line Club would be a “private social and cultural organization dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge about Rhode Island and its heritage.”

Paintings of the old ocean liners adorn the walls. Club members take boat trips, watch sporting events on giant screen televisions and listen to musical performances. Membership is by invitation and costs $275 annually.

The club has its own monogrammed clothing and giftware. It invites prominent Rhode Islanders to give lectures. Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Joseph R. Weisberger, a club member, gave the 2007 Constitution Day speech last week.

INITIALLY, THE permitting oversights weren’t much of a problem.

RIPTA, which agreed to pay Conley $50,000 annually for his pier and parking area, was unaware of any permitting problems, according to a spokeswoman. RIPTA considered it the responsibility of Providence Pier Properties to obtain any necessary permits.

The City of Providence building officials fined Conley a few hundred dollars for failing to get building permits.

The state Coastal Resources Management Council, charged with regulating coastal development, issued a cease-and-desist order after most of the work was done, and fined Conley $2,500.

CRMC spokeswoman Laura Ricketson-Dwyer said the staff learns of about 150 cases a year in which people do work without seeking permits. But she said CRMC’s staff did not consider Conley a particularly big offender. They quickly gave him the necessary permit to finish the ferry berth.

The Army Corps of Engineers, which has jurisdiction over development in navigable waters, is processing a permit for Conley’s “unauthorized work,” which includes a 90-foot floating dock and some 270 feet of riprap he installed along the shoreline.

The Army Corps does not plan to fine Conley for working without the proper permit.

“Normally we try to work with applicants to resolve problems,” said spokesman Tim Dugan. “Fines don’t help anyone.”

But Conley’s fight with the DEM has become a huge problem.

A letter to a DEM engineer in 2004 reflects the tone of their relationship. It is among boxes of documents stored at the DEM relating to Conley’s project.

Conley reported in the letter that he had a demolition permit to remove the fuel tanks on the property, and he would take care not to disturb any of the underlying soil, contaminated during a century of heavy industrial use.

“Your request for a site-investigation report is superfluous, and only tends to enrich the investigators,” he wrote. “There are existing site reports and existing remediation efforts by those who are primarily responsible for the environmental damage. Should you persist in requiring yet another site investigation, we will let a Judge of the Superior Court decide if one is necessary.”

DEM senior engineer Joseph T. Martella II responded in a letter two weeks later that the DEM had been holding the previous owners, Cargill, a company that provides agricultural commodities and industrial services, and Southern Union Co., a natural gas firm, responsible for cleaning up pollution at the site. And now that Conley’s Rhode Island State Pier Properties was the owner, it, too, was “strictly liable for the proper investigation and, if necessary, remediation of hazardous materials at the site.”

“Contrary to what was stated in your letter, the investigation of the subject site is not complete and the Department does not have a completed site investigation report,” Martella wrote.

During the last two years, Conley completed his renovation of the four-story warehouse and created a parking lot and ticket offices for the ferry.

CONLEY REFUSES to budge on the soil-contamination issue. He says DEM not only will not negotiate with him, but it also won’t meet him. And he doesn’t want to spend more on studies that could cost thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of dollars.

“I’ve come to a standstill,” he said last week. “My development plans can’t proceed. I have $5.1 million in costs with the tank farm and dock, and I can’t borrow a penny without a settlement agreement in place. We can’t get DEM to approve it. They won’t.

“I say the staff there all got their degrees from Catatonic State. I’m not going to be cowed by bureaucratic malfeasance. DEM is impeding the bay-front project — delaying by years the development of this land.”

That kind of talk isn’t helping.

Terrence D. Gray, an assistant director at the DEM, agrees with Conley that nothing has changed in the dispute for months. But he says that is Conley’s fault.

He says DEM had been talking to a previous owner, Cargill, and others when Conley bought the property. The tone of meetings changed when Conley became involved, he said.

“He never talked to us about his responsibilities,” Gray said. “He just bought it. Then he came to us.”

Gray said the DEM told Conley he had to finish an investigation of the property. The ground is saturated with oil and other contaminants.

“It’s pretty nasty stuff,” Gray said. “You might have to pump some and treat it. It’s straightforward stuff. But it’s expensive.”

In February 2006, Gray says Conley produced a proposed agreement. In May 2006, the DEM responded with a counter-agreement.

Gray says Conley never responded to the DEM’s proposal — he simply resubmitted his February proposal.

“We said that was not a good-faith response, so we put it at the bottom of the pile,” Gray said. “And that’s where we are right now.”

Gray said the next move is Conley’s.

Meanwhile, the DEM has adopted stricter rules for polluted industrial sites, raising the question of which rules should apply to Conley’s property.

“It’s kind of funny in a sick sort of way,” says Gray. “He has a very good project. He has a deep pocket on the hook. Yet for whatever reason, he comes after DEM. I don’t think he’s removed a spoonful of contaminated soils.”

Gray says the cleanup of the parking lot site does not appear to present any new or unusual challenges. “I think it requires a combination of containment and some treatment. And if he wants to build a building there, it would require vapor containment.”

Gray said he thinks Conley should be more cooperative with DEM and work to have the previous property owner, Cargill, pay for the cleanup.

“I’ve talked to his bank a number of times. I’ve sent a letter on his behalf. We’re trying to help the guy out. But it’s difficult. The bank wants to know what needs to be done out there and what their exposure is if he goes bankrupt.

“He likes to be a controversial guy,” Gray said. “Fine by him. But there is nothing stopping him from stepping up to the plate and doing what needs to be done. He could have a cleanup plan in two months.

“Most developers do due diligence,” Gray said. “Conley went in and bought this at a tax sale, then he found out what the problems were.”

Conley last week insisted that he is getting the runaround. He said he calls DEM Director W. Michael Sullivan, and Sullivan sends him to Gray. Gray sends him to someone else.

“I can’t even get a meeting with them,” he says. “It’s around and around and around.”

He insisted he and Cargill have already spent $1 million each trying to reach a settlement agreement.

Conley says a development boom on the Providence waterfront is about to happen, but won’t as long as the DEM stalls.

He says he paid for the wharf and the building by borrowing some $6 million through short-term notes. He can’t move ahead unless he rolls the notes over into a bank loan.

“And I can’t get a bank to lend me a significant amount of money because there’s no settlement agreement.

“Look at Providence,” says Conley. “All of its history and culture and diversity. And yet Providence just sits.”

The Wall Street Journal last month identified Providence as having the potential to become 1 of 10 tourism hot spots in the world in coming years.

To which Conley says, “How can they project us as a hot spot for travel when we can’t develop the waterfront?”

Both city and state planners say they are looking for ways to accommodate the old industries and the new.

“A lot of the infrastructure there is essential to the state and the entire region,” said Grover Fugate, CRMC’s executive director. “We can’t walk away from it and it would take decades to move them.”

He said the salt pile alone serves public works agencies from eastern Connecticut to Cape Cod.

CRMC has already reviewed some $4 billion in development plans for the coastlines of Providence and East Providence, Fugate said. It plans to make public a new comprehensive plan for coastal development in three or four months.

He thinks some new development can be introduced, using techniques such as creating buffers with parking garages, or limiting the use of recreational boats that could get in the way of tugs and other commercial craft.

The next step in Providence’s new development plan is a hearin

g scheduled for Oct. 1. The older businesses plan to be there.

Conley says he plans to prevail and the looming battles will simply make his successes more rewarding.

He says he is going after his neighbors, collecting affidavits alleging pollution from spray paints used at the Promet shipyard next door and fumes from the Narragansett Improvement asphalt plant across the street. He questions the relocation of Route 195 so close to the fuel tanks of the Sprague terminal to the north. It’s time for them all to go, he says.

Joel Cohen, spokesman for the existing businesses, says that because of complaints from Conley, an EPA inspector toured his Promet shipyard last week. He said no significant problems were found.

But he says the inspection is a perfect example of what the old businesses fear. They think the city will try to rezone them out of business, while Conley tries to harass them out of business.

“If he wants to take us on, he’ll be taking on the whole avenue,” Cohen said.

Conley also thinks Carcieri is behind his troubles with the DEM. He now confirms what Democratic legislative leaders refused to acknowledge during the last two years — that they were trying to create an unpaid state position for him as “Historian Laureate.”

Carcieri vetoed the bills both times.

“I think it’s a personal thing,” Conley said. The governor vetoed both bills with long explanations.

The governor’s denial, through his spokesman, Jeff Neal, was emphatic: “Patrick Conley’s comments seem odd, absurd and have no basis in fact. Governor Carcieri has absolutely no knowledge or involvement in Mr. Conley’s problems with DEM. In short, Governor Carcieri is far too busy managing the state of Rhode Island to spend any time thinking about Mr. Conley.”

For more information on Conley’s development plans, go to www.providencepiers.com. To learn about the industries seeking to block the expansion of hotels and marinas on the waterfront, go to www.providenceworkingwaterfront.org. For information on the state effort to plan development in the metropolitan coastal area, go to www.seagrant.gso.uri.edu/metrosamp/

index.html. To learn about the city’s plans for the waterfront, go to www.providenceplanning.org. and click on Providence 2020.

plord@projo.com